Playing with fire

From Microsoft's cloud servers to EA's new owners in Riyadh, the industry is testing players' consciences

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On the morning of September 25, Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice-chair and president, sent an email to his employees around the world. In careful prose he announced that the company had "ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry Of Defense". The move followed an investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call that found Israel's cyber-intelligence unit, 8200, had used Microsoft's Azure cloud to store and analyse intercepted Palestinian phone calls – "a million calls an hour", in the unit's own phrase. Investigators alleged that the technology helped identify targets for air strikes in Gaza and the West Bank, where Israel now stands accused by the United Nations of committing genocide.

The announcement marked a startling reversal. In an earlier statement, the company had said that, following both internal and external reviews, it had "found no evidence" that Microsoft's technologies "have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza", and rejected calls to sever its contracts with Israel. And, according to former Microsoft employees involved with the No Azure For Apartheid campaign group, the company had disciplined employees who spoke out against the company's ties to the military. But, following a hurried internal review, Microsoft had been forced to concede that Unit 8200's use of its systems violated its own terms of service. "We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians," Smith wrote.